Obama Over Rules His Own Experts – Plan B

I am a more than a little annoyed by this. Didn’t this guy promise to rely on the experts and instead we get some paternalistic crap about 11 year olds? This decision is going to have serious repercussions. Teenage girls are going to get pregnant with all that entails for their futures when they should have had a choice of contraception. We are not yet a nation of Baptists who believe ineffectual admonishments against having sex is an improvement over reality. Every day in this nation, particularly in the South, teenagers have sex, millions of them. They’ve been told not to. However, since the survival of the human species has depended on the young having sex for hundreds of thousands of years, it may well be possible that a church pamphlet and a pat on the head may not discourage them.

President Obama appears to be working his way through all of his campaign promises one by one, tossing them out like softballs at a little league game. I have been disgusted a long time. I don’t know what bothers me more, his fake populism or his gutless inability to negotiate.

But as an American, I think it is important for my president not to turn to paternalistic claptrap and enfeebling references to the imagined ineptitude and irresponsibility of his daughters – and young women around the country – to justify a curtailment of access to medically safe contraceptives. The notion that in aggressively conscribing women’s abilities to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy Obama is just laying down some Olde Fashioned Dad Sense diminishes an issue of gender equality, sexual health and medical access. Recasting this debate as an episode of “Father Knows Best” reaffirms hoary attitudes about young women and sex that had their repressive heyday in the era whence that program sprang.

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One thought on “Obama Over Rules His Own Experts – Plan B”

This is a complex issue. Putting aside claims of problems from drug interaction and other potentially negative health effects of taking the morning after pill, which I think is a smokescreen, a valid question is whether irresponsible girls less than 16 years old will engage in unprotected sex perhaps more frequently than otherwise because they can take a pill the next morning to prevent pregnancy (Plan B). The other side of the issue is whether the potential harm to the young girl of having an unwanted pregnancy, and the possible life-changing effects on her and her family that could include poor child-rearing, outweigh the perceived “benefits” to society of (supposedly) setting a more responsible standard that (presumably) would encourage girls that age not to get pregnant because they can’t just buy a pill and prevent the egg from being fertilized. The problem is girls say 12-13 years old, as President Obama referred to in his press conference on this issue, are unlikely to have reached the stage of moral development where they consider the consequences of their actions on others including themselves, their parents, and society in general. We live in a sexualized world where signs are all around us that young girls should aspire to look like a Victoria Secret model. We live in a sexualized world where sex sells whether it’s jeans or another product. This is a societal problem that won’t be solved in the next ___ (pick the number you want) years. So, what is the bottom line on making it illegal for girls 16 years old and younger? As much as we would like sex between minors not to happen – it will happen. Do we really want more unwanted, ultimately uncared for babies to be born into this world? Please don’t tell me they should be put up for adoption. As a society it is ethically wrong to penalize minor girls for a bad decision by forcing them into another bad decision. Sure, we can say that there are plenty of loving parents who can’t have children the “natural” way. Still, putting these unwanted babies up for adoption could emotionally scare the young girls who may even seek parental rights at a later date. Please don’t tell me they deserve it. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Finally, even if you use the absolute earliest period for brain formation – 2 weeks – the prevention of pregnancy occurs about 13 days earlier.